The present invention relates generally to electronic toys which, on the basis of a prestored program, selectively perform a predetermined operation in response to an external factor or a state of the toy, and methods for controlling the electronic toys. More particularly, the present invention relates to an improved electronic toy which can freely replace a program, toy-operation-related information or other content with other or new content via a communication terminal and can perform an operation on the basis of the other content.
Electronic toys have been known which, in response to an external factor or a state of the toy detected by one or more built-in sensors, execute a program stored in a storage device and make a motion or produce a sound in accordance with the program. For example, the known electronic toys use an acceleration sensor to detect an amount, velocity, direction, etc. of each motion of the toy, an inclination sensor to detect a posture or orientation of the toy, an infrared sensor to detect whether or not there is any person around the toy, a piezoelectric (touch) sensor to detect whether or not a force greater than a predetermined value has been applied to the toy or detect a level of a force applied to the toy, a photo sensor to detect light (or variation in light) greater than a predetermined level around the toy or a shape of an object present around the toy, and a sound sensor to detect whether or not there has been produced a sound greater than a predetermined level around the toy or detect a type of such a sound. In this way, the electronic toys each can detect an external factor having occurred around the toy or a particular state of the toy via any of the sensors, and create operation information corresponding to the type of the sensor having detected such an external factor or a state.
In recent years, more sophisticated electronic toys have come on the scene, which are arranged to appear as if they were growing up and gradually learning new operations to be performed. Specifically, to this end, a stepwise changeover is made between programs for causing the toy to perform various operations (e.g., by making motions and producing sounds) in response to detection by various sensors as noted above, taking into account an elapsed time, the types of the programs or the number of times the current program has been executed, so as to sequentially vary the motions and sounds that can be made and produced by the toy.
Each of the conventional electronic toys is designed to make motions and produce sounds merely in accordance with the prestored programs. Thus, the electronic toy tends to readily become boring or uninteresting to a user, so that the user generally does not play with the same toy for a long period of time. As a consequence, the conventional electronic toys would unavoidably have short life as products.
One possible approach for avoiding the above-discussed problem is to prestore a great many content, such as programs and information related to operations to be performed by the electronic toy. However, in this case, the electronic toy has to be equipped with a storage device having an extremely great capacity, which thus creates a new problem that the manufacturing costs of the toy increase considerably.